Now available! PocketBible for Windows Store

Windows 8 users, this one’s for you! We are pleased to announce the availability of PocketBible on the Windows Store. Download it now for free!

PocketBible for Windows Store runs on devices using Windows 8 (includes tablets, laptops, desktops). We think you’ll find this an amazing new version of PocketBible with a true Windows 8 look and feel! PocketBible for Windows Store features include:

40+ Free Bibles and books with registration. Download past purchases of Bibles and books into the app at no charge. The 20 title download limit in the app can be exceeded with purchase of Advanced Feature Set ($6.99).

Move easily through Bibles and books by simply scrolling. Quickly move around the bible using an intuitive table of contents display

Quickly find any word or phrase

Split screen display

Mark your place with bookmarks

Share verses by Text, Email or Facebook

Use the daily reading feature to visually track your progress through a devotional book

Pin a book to your start screen!

We hope you’ll support continued development of PocketBible on this platform by purchasing the Advanced Feature Set for $6.99. Advanced Features include:

Highlighting of Bible text

Add notes to any verse of the Bible

Synchronize bookmarks, highlights and bookmarks with our server and your other devices that use PocketBible (and are able to synchronize)

Split screen into 2 to 5 windows

Download as many Bibles and books as you own (no limit but based on what you own)

23 Responses

Wow! Didn’t see that one coming… (maybe I was asleep). Just downloaded it and bingo; no problems at all. OK so my Windows 8 isn’t touch so I’m in two minds as to whether the (old) desktop version would be better but that’s not the point.
Thanks – for making this app available across such a wide range of devices; it never ceases to amaze me.
+1 crown jewel in heaven (!)
Michael

Okay, full circle. I started out with PocketBible for Windows CE (I guess that was a “minitablet”) and your Palmpilot product, stuck with the Windows Mobile Pocketbible until that unit sadly finally died and you blessed us with PocketBible for Android on my phone and tablet. Now as I start to move to windows 8 (phone dying) you bless us again with a new client! Works great on my ASUS tablet/convertable.

Don’t mind a bit paying for the Advanced Features Set. Hope Craig and the rest at Laridian are with us for many more years. Will send better comments later after using a little more.

Mike, I think you mean “after Microsoft took a long break from its developers”. We were very happy developing for Windows Mobile and would’ve continued for as long as Microsoft kept updating it. But they completely abandoned the platform and offered no path for us to upgrade our apps to Windows Phone.

The desktop is a different story. PocketBible for Windows continues to run as a desktop app in Windows 8. But Microsoft did create a bit of confusion by having TWO kinds of apps for Windows, then naming the new apps “for Windows Store” while allowing us to sell our desktop app in the Windows Store if we want. So potentially you could get PocketBible for Windows from the Windows Store but it wouldn’t be the same app as PocketBible for Windows Store which you could also get from the Windows Store. We don’t currently offer PocketBible for Windows in the Windows Store. We only offer PocketBible for Windows Store in the Windows Store. I’m just saying we could offer PocketBible for Windows in the Windows Store, then it would be confusing.

Well, whatever the past, I’m glad I have it back I started back on an HP iPAQ.

I’ve loaded it on both the RT and Pro and purchased the advanced features and it looks great!

One suggestion – I have three panes set up, and I like to use the “Black” view – both for low light and I think it saves some power. While the active pane has the black background, the others have a grey background.

Would it be possible to have some other kind of indication of the active pane, in order to leave the others with a black background? Even something as simple as having the Title of the pane bolded, or of another color?

The black background won’t save you any power unless you are running on an OLED display where the black pixel is just not turned on. I’m not aware of any tablets running using OLED yet.

I think the important thing about the active pane is that it’s really obvious to the user. Changing just the title bar may not be obvious enough. Probably the best way to try and improve this sort of functionality is to join our testing group: https://groups.google.com/group/pbwinstore. Then you can discuss this with other users and I can get feedback on these issues from a number of users and then provides a test versions so people can give their feedback.

Thanks so much for your feedback. We have made a change for the next release to go into the store (2.0.4.250), that will use the same font size the note viewer as is used to display the books. I hope this will meet your needs.

Hopefully that release will be available by early next week. 2.0.3.249 is currently going through certification in the store so we have to wait until that is certified before we can submit build 250.

So I had pocketbible for windows installed on my windows 8 machine with all my books, how do I point the new pocketbible for windows 8 to my book library that I already have installed for pocketbible for windows 7?

Very nice product. Well done.
I really appreciate your products – I’ve been a happy customer for about 10 years.
I like the SBL Greek for Windows – and I’m hoping you have it for Android ‘coming soon’.

Enhancement request: I’d like to be able to use it with a keyboard (only). Ctrl+G brings up the Goto box, but I can’t then type “Mark 1:1 “, I have to reach for the mouse… (Curiously, up/down arrow moves horizontally through the list.)
Similarly, Ctrl+F beings up the Search box, and I can type ‘a little wine’ and it finds 1 Tim 5:23, but there’s nothing I can press on the keyboard that will take me to that verse (unless I missed something).

Love the new app! PocketBible Works great on Windows 8. It took 2 minutes for me to recognize that the app was great and I upgraded to the advanced feature set.

Please consider the following features for future updates.
1) Include the Autostudy feature that is available on the iOS version.

2) Include the “sync now” feature from the Windows desktop version (i.e. ctrl+S). I prefer to have sync off most of the time because I am bouncing around everywhere, and it would be really nice to have this feature instead of going through all of the step to turn sync on, then scroll a verse, then turn sync off.

3) Mouse-over on a verse reference brings a pop-up window with the verse. Although I realize this may not be easy or possible in windows 8 store since I can’t think of a touch equivalent.

You did a great job of making keyboard and mouse navigation easy on the App! I have windows 8 without a touchscreen and navigation is easy. Great Job!

You can use the cloud library to download the books that you want. The desktop version is completely separated, as Michelle says from the store version, you can’t use files from one to the other, that ensures the security of the system because we store version can’t go and access files outside of our own folder.

Thanks so much for your feedback. Keyboard interface is something that we need to continue working on.

The ability to type in a verse is not something we’ve had requested before, and I have now added that to the to do list for a future release.

The reason that the selection moves horizontally rather than vertically is because windows does the actual display and wrapping of the list so I don’t have the ability to say go to the next line.

Thanks for your feedback regarding search on the keyboard. Just press tab and then tab which will take you to the list. You should then be able to press enter. Unfortunately you can’t, I don’t even get the keydown message, so I’m unable to get the keypress. I will note this down and look into this further.

1) this is something that is on the to do list for future releases if there is enough interest in the advanced features.

2) thanks for the suggestion I will put this in the to do list.

3) I have done a bit of thinking about this, the problem is that windows requires us to provide the content of the tooltip at the same time that we display the book’s content, and that would simply slow things down too much. Hopefully I can find a way to work around that at some stage. On a tablet you would tap and hold and that would display the tooltip.

Just to back up Stefan’s comments about tooltips (the pop-up text you see when you hover over a link): We had to write a custom tooltip functionality for the Windows Desktop version of PocketBible for the very reason Stefan describes. We have to manually detect that you’re hovering, build the text we want to display, manually create an appropriately sized window, display the text in the window, then watch for you to un-hover so that we can clear the text. It was non-trivial because it doesn’t really work the way the built-in functionality of tooltips is designed.

#2 is now implemented. You can now press CTRL+S to toggle book synchronisation. This will be available in version 2.0.5.251 which I am now uploading to the store. Hopefully will be available in the next few days.

I suddenly remembered that you can enter a Bible verse at any time using the keyboard, if you start typing whilst you are viewing a book, it will display a command bar. So if you type “Mark” and press enter then it will go directly to Mark, which may be even simpler than your suggestion.

I am working on the ability to enter a Bible reference on the goto flyout, but there are some technical hitches relating to the way that Windows decides to change the focus for some reason…

You can now enter a Bible reference in the verse toc flyout. By default the text box does not have focus, but if you use the keyboard to get there than it will be focused by default so you can just type away. This feature is now undergoing testing. If you would like to have a look at it, feel free to join our testing group: https://groups.google.com/group/pbwinstore.

Otherwise, I hope that the release will be out publicly late in the week.

Thanks so much for implementing the Ctrl+s sync feature. It is extremely helpful.

Another useful feature would be the ability to copy selected text. I currently only see the ability to copy a complete verse (for a bible) and an entire section from a commentary. Sometimes I would like to copy just a few sentences or a paragraph.